How-To - page 2

There are lots of things you can do with an old Mac. No one will fault you for upgrading to Apple’s latest and greatest, but your old Mac can still find a job to do, too.

It used to be that when your old iMac kicked the can, you hollowed it out and made an aquarium or a desk lamp. These days, Macs have a much longer shelf life. The right model can give you years upon years of loyal service. (Not to mention, modern Macs are too thin to house a fish.)

Here are the six best things you can do with an old Mac. Watch our latest video or keep reading below.

you can turn off autocorrect on your iphone if you want your texts to come across as casual and laid back. psychologically, lowercase writing that isnt punctuated with apostrophes or periods read as more informal and friendly

turning off autocorrect is super-easy. you can even turn off capitalization but leave on corrections for spelling and grammar. see how awesome it is? heres how to do it!!! :)

It’s easy to take a screenshot on your iPhone to keep a copy of something in your photo library for later. You can even screenshot a whole page on an iPhone at once using a somewhat hidden feature.

If you want to take a screenshot of something like an in-depth recipe, a lengthy email or anything else that doesn’t fit on your iPhone screen, you can take an extended screenshot. Instead of filling your library with five separate images, you can use your iPhone to screenshot the entire page (or a large section of it) without using an app to stitch them together after the fact.

Here’s how it’s done. (I’ll show you how to do this on a Mac, too.)

You can set up your Apple TV to control volume on a separate sound system, like a sound bar. It may not work out of the box, but poking around in Settings, you can use the convenient volume buttons built into the Siri Remote.

If you have a separate sound system or an older television, the volume buttons on your Apple TV remote may not work directly. You don’t have to keep two or three remotes sitting around — you can make it all work from just one. It just takes a little setup. 

Screensavers fell out of fashion a long time ago, but Apple’s Aerial screensaver looks so beautiful, it just might make you reconsider. In fact, with its stunning visuals, it might just be the best Mac screensaver around.

The Aerials started on the Apple TV, showing gorgeous, sweeping helicopter photography of the world’s greatest natural landscapes, underwater sights and cityscapes — even shots from space. Now, if you have a desktop display set up somewhere prominently in your house, you can get the same beautiful vistas on your computer with the Aerial screensaver for Mac.

Here’s where to find this beautiful Mac screensaver, plus some setup tips that will really help it shine.

A hot new feature in iOS 17.3 is Apple Music playlist collaboration. In advance of a party, road trip or any kind of themed event, you and others organizing the music can build a playlist together.

This isn’t to be confused with a similar feature, SharePlay, which lets people in the same room add songs to a live queue. SharePlay is more ephemeral; it lets others nearby play songs in the car or to a Bluetooth speaker without passing around your unlocked phone.

A shared Apple Music playlist is saved and can be replayed at any time. To find out everything you need to know about Apple Music playlist collaboration, keep reading or watch our quick how-to video. 

The new Apple Sports app gives iPhone users a handy tool for tracking sports scores and stats. Previously buried inside Apple News, the constantly updated sports data becomes much more accessible when delivered via a dedicated iPhone sports app.

You can choose which teams and leagues you follow, get live updates on scores (and betting odds), and tap to open live coverage of the game in a streaming app.

The official Apple Sports app is available on the App Store now. Here’s how to use it.

If you want to get work done on your Vision Pro, you’ll really want a Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad for precision input and pointing. And for gaming, you can connect a controller, too. The Vision Pro officially supports Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch controllers, with support for some other Bluetooth models as well.

Follow these instructions to pair a Bluetooth device with Vision Pro.

Control Center in Vision Pro works very differently than on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac. But as with Apple’s other platforms, you can customize the Vision Pro Control Center to make it far more useful.

The first few days after I got my Vision Pro, I found Control Center to be intensely irritating. It constantly appeared in my field of view, bugging me like a hair in my mouth or a piece of popcorn in my teeth.

Luckily, with just a few changes, you can make Control Center way less annoying.

If you get a Vision Pro, you’ll soon need to learn how to charge up that battery. Apple only promises two hours of battery life on its revolutionary headset. Although real-world usage is pushing closer to three, if you want your spatial computing to be untethered, you’ll need to charge the Vision Pro battery often.

Here’s how to do it — along with some tips that will keep you (and your data) safe.

It’s possible to share your screen in your Vision Pro so that other people can see what you’re seeing, too. This is especially helpful in Vision Pro Guest Mode, to help you guide newbies through the unfamiliar headset.

Vision Pro is an exciting new product, but it can be isolating. The incredible experiences it enables aren’t social. However, you can AirPlay your screen to a nearby Apple TV, iPad, Mac or iPhone.

Here’s how.

You can easily fix Apple Vision Pro eye tracking and hand tracking if your headset starts to act up. You’ll want to follow the steps below if the device stops accurately tracking your gaze or your hand gestures.

As you probably know, hand tracking and eye tracking are essential to using Vision Pro. When they don’t work as well as possible, it’s incredibly frustrating. I know, because sometimes the headset’s sensors have a hard time tracking my eyes up and down. It’s like using an iPad stylus on a touchscreen that’s slightly uncalibrated.

The quick methods below can fix some Vision Pro eye- and hand-tracking problems for you.  You can approach trigger a reset three different ways — by pressing a button on the headset, going into Settings or asking Siri for help — all with the same ultimate result. (In my experience, this is one situation in which Siri excels.)

Whether to add new features or squash bugs, Apple releases Vision Pro updates from time to time. (The latest one, visionOS 1.0.3, arrived Monday. It eliminates a major headache that plagued Vision Pro owners who forgot their devices’ passcodes.) Luckily, downloading and installing visionOS updates is easy once you know how.

In fact, installing Vision Pro software updates proves very similar to the process for updating an iPhone, iPad or Mac. We’ll show you how it’s done — and also how to get visionOS beta updates. If you want to take a chance on betas, you can test upcoming Vision Pro features before they officially arrive.

The 2024 Super Bowl is Sunday, and football fans can watch via their favorite Apple device. Maybe it’s on an Apple TV connected to the big screen in your living room, or you might need to watch on your iPhone because you have to be at work tonight.

Whatever your setup is, here are the best ways to stream the big game.

Making a FaceTime call in Vision Pro is a bit more involved than on iPhone or Mac. After all, you have a computer strapped onto your face, which is not typical with other devices.

Step 0, of course, is setting up your Persona — the dynamic, digital version of yourself that Vision Pro uses for FaceTime calls. If you didn’t create a Persona during the Vision Pro setup process, or your Persona looks less fantastic than you’d like, we wrote a separate explainer for you:  How to create your Persona in Vision Pro (or make it better).

Once your Persona is set, here’s how to FaceTime in Vision Pro.

You can take a screenshot or a screen recording on Vision Pro, just like on an iPhone or a Mac. The screenshot is saved as an image file, and is easy to view in Photos or share.

Here’s how to take screenshots in Vsion Pro.

 Apple Vision Pro is controlled by just five simple gestures you do with your hands. The Vision Pro gestures even work in the dark!

If you’re going to try on someone’s Vision Pro, or you’re lucky enough to buy one yourself, here’s how to use what Apple calls “the most advanced personal electronics device ever.”

While Vision Pro takes a physical form resembling ski goggles, the whole idea is that, unlike with a MacBook or iPhone, you don’t have a screen, keyboard, mouse or trackpad to interact with. It’s an invisible computer. Apple has a bunch of breakthrough gestures to make it work — here’s how to use them.

Spatial photos and videos look incredibly lifelike in full 3D while wearing an Apple Vision Pro headset. But how do you take photos with Vision Pro? It might be confusing at first since there’s no Camera app in the headset. Instead, Vision Pro uses a new Capture app.

But don’t worry. Any photos or videos you take with Vision Pro will sync to your Photos library. And they’re fully compatible with your other Apple devices, although you’ll only see them there in a boring two dimensions, like it’s still 2023. Yawn.

Screen sharing from your Mac to Vision Pro is a great way to work inside the headset while using your Mac’s keyboard and trackpad. You can enlarge your Mac’s screen to enormous size, and surround it with apps that work inside Vision Pro.

It’s called Mac Virtual Display. Unfortunately, it’s limited to only one Mac screen. But set up right, it can be the ultimate big screen setup — without the actual big screens.

Here’s how to use your Mac with Vision Pro.

The Vision Pro Persona is a 3D representation of yourself that will appear to others in FaceTime calls. It also fuels the EyeSight feature, which shows a ghostly 3D version of your eyes on the outside of the headset to make the device seem less isolating. 

Many people criticize the Personas for looking unnatural, so the feature very much deserves its beta label. However, there are some things you can do to create a better one. If you didn’t create a Vision Pro Persona while setting up your headset, or want to redo it to make yours look a little less uncanny, I’ll show you how to do it at any time.

How do you force restart Apple Vision Pro? All computers lock up from time to time — even spatial computers you wear on your face. You don’t want to keep it on if it’s locking up; that could lead to a nasty head injury!

Here’s how to reboot or restart Vision Pro.

Vision Pro Guest User mode is how you get your Vision Pro ready to show to someone else. Because if you own one of Apple’s new AR/VR headsets, everyone you know is inevitably going to want to try it on. That’s where Vision Pro guest mode comes in.

I will be visiting my mom this weekend, who’s enormously excited to try out the new technology. This is how to set up a Guest User on Vision Pro.

Do AirTags make noise? They don’t look like they make any sound, but yes indeed they do. They make noise for a variety of reasons, and in my experience, it can sometimes be mysterious — or irritating.

• What does the setup chime mean?
• Why is this AirTag I found beeping?
• And how do I stop it?

I have about half a dozen AirTags, my family has about a dozen more, and we use them regularly to find lost or forgotten items.

But they can sometimes be mysterious and the sounds they make aren’t always obvious. Here are all the reasons why it’s beeping at you, and how to stop it. But be warned: it’s not a simple yes/no situation.

Any time a company sends a push notification to an iPhone, its application can gather information about the user, including their location, according to security researchers. Meta and TikTok reportedly use push notification tracking, and many other companies do it, too.

Fortunately, there’s a simple solution for users to protect their privacy and keep apps from spying on them.

There are a lot of things you can do with old iPhones. In fact, it might be worth keeping them around rather than trading them in. There are all kinds of things you can use an old iPhone for: a DIY HomePod, a games console, a camera, a weather station, a smart display or a digital clock. And someone else you know may want it if you’re feeling generous.

Here are the nine things you can do with an old iPhone.